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An̲̳̳drew
Asked: 2009-10-10 18:41:30 +0800 CST

Providing command line arguments for an executable through a shell script

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Suppose I have an executable xyz that takes a variable number of command-line arguments, and a wrapper Korn shell script xyz.ksh. Is there an easy way to pass all of the shell script arguments as-is to the executable?

unix

3 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    You need to use:

    "$@"

    for correct parameter expansion in all cases. This behaviour is the same in both bash and ksh.

    Most of the time, $* or $@ will give you what you want. However, they expand parameters with spaces in it. "$*" gives you all parameters reduced down to one. "$@" gives you what was actually passed to the wrapper script.

    See for yourself (again, under either bash or ksh):

    [tla ~]$ touch file1 file2 space\ file
[tla ~]$ ( test() { ls $*; }; test file1 file2 space\ file )
ls: cannot access space: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access file: No such file or directory
file1  file2
[tla ~]$ ( test() { ls $@; }; test file1 file2 space\ file )
ls: cannot access space: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access file: No such file or directory
file1  file2
[tla ~]$ ( test() { ls "$*"; }; test file1 file2 space\ file )
ls: cannot access file1 file2 space file: No such file or directory
[tla ~]$ ( test() { ls "$@"; }; test file1 file2 space\ file )
file1  file2  space file
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  2. I think you're looking for the $* variable: http://www.well.ox.ac.uk/~johnb/comp/unix/ksh.html#commandlineargs

    It's otherwise known as $@ in bash, I think.

    • 1

  3. Yes. Use the $* variable. Try this script:

    #!/bin/ksh

echo $*

    and then invoke the script with something like:

    scriptname a b c foobar

    Your output will be:

    a b c foobar
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